Thursday, April 28, 2011

I Peter 1:3-9

Faith in Time

Here is a place of disaffection
Time before and time after
In a dim light: neither daylight
Investing form with lucid stillness . . .

. . . Nor darkness to purify the soul
Emptying the sensual with deprivation
Cleansing affection from the temporal.
Neither plentitude nor vacancy. Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning. . .

                    from “Burnt Norton” by T. S. Eliot 

In the British television show “Wire in the Blood” (Season 4, Episode 3, “Hole in the Heart”) Dr. Tony Hill, a criminal psychologist called in by the Bradfield police to profile suspects in order to solve murder cases, is sitting on the ledge of a high building with a man ready to commit suicide. That's how the episode opens. It closes with them back on top of a building. This time, the man has a new found faith calling itself Christian, sadly forged by a cult leader who has covenanted his followers into atrocious acts of destruction, after which, they are to take their own lives. When Dr. Hill tries, compassionately, to disabuse the man of the deceptions of the cult leader, the man's new found faith, such as it is, is finally stripped, and he does not carry out his atrocious deed. He accepts Dr. Hill's embrace, whispers “nice try”, and jumps. The scene closes with Dr. Hill alone, doubled over with grief. He is not a believer. There is no faith. Not in time. Not in that time.

The struggle between faith in God – specifically, Christian faith – and the terrors of daily life, particularly as encountered in the detective bureau of a police department that seems to have to deal with enough serial killers to wipe out the population of that whole corner of Britain – reoccurs throughout this powerful series. Indeed, the name “Wire in the Blood” is taken from T. S. Eliot's poem“Burnt Norton”, from which I quote above. The poem reflects Eliot's probe for some semblance of hope and faith in a world that seems devoid of either.

Hope, and the faith from which hope must spring, are so critical to human life that, without them, it is indeed as if one had a hole in ones heart. If that hope is missing in the lives of young children, they may well spend the rest of their lives making up for the lack, hopefully as a recovery of faith. We can have faith in many things that are less than God, and, to some extent, they can give meaning to life. Loving parents. Falling in love. Friends. Work. Games and entertainments. Causes. All these things and many more can keep us perking from day to day pretty well. But they all run their course. They are fixed to our experience in a series of fleeting "presents", and the present, as Eliot so beautifully puts it, may be a dim light, neither daylight nor darkness, full of

. . strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning. . .

Faith in God is not, as Dr. Hill rather disparagingly puts it, “having a talk with our invisible friend.” The humor here is that he himself is famous for talking to himself as he explores the criminal psyches of cases to his “invisible friends”. He is often an embarrassment at social occasions, like old detective Columbo in his trench coat. He is not averse to the possibility of faith in God. He sometimes asks people to explain it to him. To show him. On one episode he actually goes to church, and after the service the priest, in this case, for once, not depicted as some kind of pious idiot, invites him to talk with him after the service, to which Dr. Hill replies “I don't believe in God.” The priest tells him not to worry about the details, but would he like to join him for a cup of bad instant coffee? Dr. Hill says yes, he would very much like to do so. But it never happens. Tragedy strikes once again, keeping the issue in limbo. The present is, once again, a debacle, for which faith does not come in time.

If faith does not come “in time”, where does it come from? Are we talking about “faith in time” as “in the nick of time” - which was not so for the man on the building – or “faith in real time” - ditto for the man on the building? Yes. Both, and more, for the temporal and existential components of faith in the present- or the absence of it - are critical to the poem. And because time and the timing of faith in the resurrected Christ are so hard at work in the I Peter text. Like the man on the building, the people to whom the scriptural author is writing are suffering in real time. And, of course, in one way or another, we and Tony Hill are their colleagues in suffering. 

Look at verses 8 and 9 (NRSV):

Although you have not seen him, you love him; 
and even though you do not see him now, 
you believe in him and rejoice with an indescribable and glorious joy,
for you are receiving the outcome of your faith, 
the salvation of your souls.

Is this naïve to believe in God we cannot see? I think it is if our idea of faith is merely a matter of a person's choosing - to say “I believe” as if we were placing a bet on a particular horse at the track. Not that there is nothing to be said for the “try it and see” approach. But if faith in God is just a matter of “buying into”, then let the buyer beware. The disciple Thomas in the gospel thought he needed to see, and even touch, but seeing God is not really where faith resides. It is in the living. The very palpable experience of being seen that courses through a person like blood or air. To have faith in God is not a self-engendered trick. We are not required to believe the sound of our own voice. We are “wired in the blood” for faith. We do not generally see what we believe in except by the indirection of love and beauty, often in the most unlikely places. The faith itself creates in us something we cannot put our finger on. Faith comes in time, and it is not our time. Not our present, at least not solely. Never soley. It is a time that runs through us from outside us. That faith is not from us should give us cause to hope, and even celebrate, because it makes the issue of self-deception beside the point. There is nothing to choose. Only to receive, like breathing air.

It is in that “still point” in the dimness that T. S. Eliot is exploring where past, present and future come crashing curiously down in the dust of the garden. In faith, however, it is there that we receive. What? The slightest smile that we cannot account for? The joke that is on us that we can finally laugh at? A brush of air on the cheek. The embrace of one who is trying to help us who may not even say “I believe in God”, but within whose act of compassion is closer to that belief than he realizes? Our compassion is always more on cue than our self-perception. Yes, any of these could be the case, but you will not find them in the poem – unless the longing itself is a work of faith. I suspect it is. There is so much of us that we objectify that needs to be unhinged and given space, and that is the work of faith in God. We can certainly see the unhinging of time and place in “Burnt Norton” and “Wire in the Blood”. In faith in time (in God) memories and promises flow into realized hope. Eliot's “still point” pulses, even in the dim. It is pure gift, germane to the entirety of homo sapiens, like Jesus on the cross, surrendering himself to faith in time that cracks open the present to the power of God. Even post-mortem.

© 2011 Andy Gay